Week 6 of lecture session was on 20th February 2013. At this time, Mr Afendras was giving lecture about global issues. In the beginning, he showed us a video about the global issues happening nowadays. The video entitled Ted Talks. In that video, it was shown some of the problem occurring in this world. These were the top problems to be solved: 800 million people were starving, 1 billion people were lack of clean drinking water, 2 billion people were lack of sanitation, 2 million people were in AIDS, 175 million of international migrants, 940 million of illiterate adults, and several billion were affected by global warming. The next one was the other challenges, such as: climate change, commutable diseases, conflicts, education, financial instability, governance corruption, malnutrition and hunger, population: migration, sanitation and water, and subsidies and trade barriers. Prof Afendras came out with some questions, such as: Are migrant problems? What are your priorities if you are given some money to solve these problems? What is the main problem to be solved in order to solve other problems?
In my point of view, my priority to solve this problem was governance and corruption. It was also the main problem to be solved in order to solve other problems. Many problems could not be solved because of not good governance. Several people in governance sector were doing corruption which could delay the solving of the problems. They used the money for their own purposes. If those people were not doing corruption, these problems could be solved step by step.
There was one case of corruption in my country. Once, there was a plan to build a mess for SEA Games in Indonesia. SEA Games is a multi event sports tournament for the nations in Southeast Asia. The government of Indonesia gave some billion rupiah to the contractors in order for them to build a good mess. However, the constructors did not do their job properly. They corrupt the money as much as 1 billion rupiah and the building was not finish on time.
Well, in my opinion, if we had solved the problem of corruption, we could try find the solution for the other problems. It was because the money for solving the problems was not used inappropriately.
Here, I also would like to answer another question which was whether the migrants were problems. I thought, migrant was not a problem as long as the country in the migrant moved had some jobs to do. Let’s take an example of Malaysia. There were many migrants from Indonesia. They usually came to Malaysia with their relatives who already stayed in Malaysia. Their purpose was to get a job. In fact, what they were doing was good. They made an economic growth for Malaysia. At that time, Malaysia needed many labours to work for their companies.
For the tutorial, it was on Friday, 22nd February 2013. We were asked to give some keywords for the two topics which were Globalisation and Global Warming. These were my keywords for globalisation: modernisation, free economic zones, culture diverse, cultural marriage, common time zone, inflation, online games, FIFA World Cup, and ASEAN. For global warming, these were my keywords: CFC and go green. From this week, I reflected that there were many problems happening in this world that we needed to solve. Moreover, it was our way to decide how to solve it. I meant, we needed to know the main problem so that we could solve the other problems.
Reflective Diary of Seminar on Current Affairs Week 6 – Global Issues